What happened in the Beta? Now all these changes?

Hello,

Just a question as a reaction to all the changes happening to the classes now.
I see a lot of them and some are real big changes, like aspect of the fox being removed and hunters being able to shoot while moving.
There are a lot of them.

This has me wondering what happened in the beta? Weren't they able to evaluate the classes well enough or balance things, as a lot of nerfs and buffs are being implemented.

In the past i didn't pay attention to this, so I don't know if this is normal.
I thought all of this was done and tested in beta. Little changes, like some tweeking, balancing and such is normal but the changes, as I read them, are just too big.

How do you think about this?
It could be that this is normal, I just don't know. That's why I am asking.

It's obviously not possible to test everything in the beta. Nothing beats reality, after all. It's normal though. Every expansion, one or two classes are usually receiving the heavy nerf bat 1-2 months into release. Beastmaster hunters probably still remember the last time. Feral Druids from way back also.

This time I think they had far too many ppl on the beta for a lot of usefull info to make it into the hands of devs. Many of the issues in the game can be found on 4 to 5 month old threads on the beta forums at wows website. With all the QQ from so many ppl it was just lost in the chaos. This is how you end up seeing all the buggy Golden Lotus quests go live even with 100s of posts with issues on them going back to May and June.

First tier is always public beta. Remember the beginning of WOTLK? Cata?

Pretty much that. We live in a time when people happily pay for semi polished games, more often then not, nowhere near ready to be launched. It's not just WoW, it's pretty much every game out there, and most certainly, every MMO. While it's probably not physically possible to release a perfect, bug free, balanced game, simply due to the complexity of the projects nowadays, it's really inexcusable to deliver what we're getting, on average, from anyone, whether a small or big industry name.

Betas seem to be more of a 'let's see if this is kinda holding together' - it is? great, launch time!

There is no level of personal responsibility in anything people do and that leads to a general consensus that it's ok to make money on half products, after all, it's noones fault if it fails, is it?

A lot of issues were already brought up numerous times with proposed better ideas from players, but Blizzard doesn't listen and makes their own crap changes as always.

I love Blizzard, but I have to agree they didn't get rid completely from that Activision philosophy of changing stuff based only on reports. They already change stuff based on their own internal experiences and gut feeling again, after cataclysm fiasco, but they still pretty rooted by live servers reports.

They did not seem to understand that almost all raiding hunters will just macro aspect changing into every shot... because there is no downside to it.. and therefore it is completely useless for gameplay reasons..

The most annoying thing was the sound effect every second for the other players in the raid with combat sounds on.

You can not predict what the players are going to do with the tools you give them. Some Talents are ok on paper but in some encounters stupidly strong if you stack them in your raid. It is a problem when most raids search for that one class because than the encounter is considered easy. Most of the time it is just the majority opinion instead of coming up with a different strategy. That's the problem in pvp as well in my opinion. Some say this works so well, other variants are not even tried by most players.

A lot of issues were already brought up numerous times with proposed better ideas from players, but Blizzard doesn't listen and makes their own crap changes as always.

Well, you have to remember, those issues are only issues in the eyes of the forums. The forums are not a good representation of the real game, as the people posting in them are a tiny, tiny fraction of the WoW population. The people playing beta were up to maybe 2 million, and even if 10% of those posted in forums (which is a ridiculously high number) that means 200,000 people are giving feedback in the forums. Out of 10 million. That's 2%.

A big part of the problem was that this time around, they didn't implement level 90 templates. Players had to slog through hours of leveling (at one point there just weren't enough quests to get to 90 in beta as well), most people logged on and said "fuck that" and deleted beta.

Those that did grind to 90 only had the free PVP gear to test out class balance. That's one of the reasons why they made drastic tank balance changes less than a week in, because very few tanks actually grinded out a proper set of 463 gear to test raids with and let the auto-scaling do the work. It's also why healer balance is completely fucked.

Sure, Blizzard has a history of not listening until people on General forums are crying about it, but the drastic changes now are a direct result of these problems in beta. This time around, no solid data was gathered. It was literally just a public preview. Shame.

Probably because they got totally burned from taking onboard too much player 'feedback' over DKs.

Not sure what you're referring to but I'd take player feedback balancing over Cataclysm and so far MoP PvP any day.

---------- Post added 2012-10-29 at 08:56 PM ----------

Originally Posted by SinAscendant

Well, you have to remember, those issues are only issues in the eyes of the forums. The forums are not a good representation of the real game, as the people posting in them are a tiny, tiny fraction of the WoW population. The people playing beta were up to maybe 2 million, and even if 10% of those posted in forums (which is a ridiculously high number) that means 200,000 people are giving feedback in the forums. Out of 10 million. That's 2%.

If they're not going to listen then what's the point in feedback? It's also pretty easy to look at which issues are legitimate because bad players will just rage instead of giving a proper answer/argument.